Soon after taking the reins of the big box retailer in 2010, Kevin (pictured below) realized that “if [Office Depot] was going to win, it was going to need to differentiate on customer experience.” He wanted to see for himself, through mystery-shopping his own stores, what the experience was like before making any changes.

This journey took him on a four-month road trip with the goal of answering one simple question from customers: What brings you into Office Depot today?

“It may sound like a silly question, but it’s at the very heart of our transformational journey,” he said.

What he found was that Office Depot had good experiences, but they weren’t nearly good enough. What’s more, he believed they had been measuring the wrong things. “They were interesting metrics,” he said, “but who cares, because they were not impacting the customer experience.”

He took all these observations, plus hundreds of thousands of points of feedback from surveys and customer interviews, and boiled it down into three focused areas of improvement: Fix the in-store experience, shrink the size of stores and add more solutions such as printing centers to its product-led strategy.

After creating two concept stores with the new model, Office Depot is in process of rolling out the new processes, training and methodology to all 1,100 stores by the end of the year.

Office Depot’s story was one of many at the event, which has quickly become one of Forrester’s most in-demand gatherings. The venerable research and advisory firm has staked its ground in the burgeoning customer experience field and has real convening power across vendors, clients and consultants in the space.

Attendees buzzed about customer journey maps, organizational culture, mobile and a new digital first, empowered customer in control of the buying experience from start to finish.

“The world has changed and the balance of power has shifted to the customers,” says Harley Manning, Forrester’s Vice President and Research Director. “We can prove customer experience correlates to loyalty,” he said while sharing stories of companies attributing billions of dollars to customer experience improvements. “That’s billions with a B,” he said, punctuating the point.

As I talked to folks at the event, it was clear there was a shared sense of understanding on the value of customer experience, but a lot of uncertainly on how to actually execute on it, or where to start.

Forrester’s Mora Dorsey spoke to this in keynote. “How many of you have degrees in Customer Experience” she asked, as the room remained motionless. She offered up that while customer expectations are higher than ever, our understanding of the discipline is still very low.

What’s clear is that digital is disrupting the field faster than organizations can begin to wrap their arms around it.

“It’s like skating to a ping pong ball” said Phil Bienert, Senior Vice President of Consumer Digital Experiences at AT&T. “Our customer is digital first and wants to do everything with the ease of touching fingertip to a device.”

Depending on which research you read, mobile consumption is on pace to overtake the desktop in the next 2-4 years. And while customers are interacting across channels and devices, most organizations are not yet equipped to deliver a unified experience.

Bienert has a labs division at AT&T that is looking to redefine the journey map with a focus on “graceful handoffs between touchpoints.”

Forrester wraps all of this up into a simple concept that it calls “Outside In,” which is conveniently also the title of its upcoming book on customer experience due out in late August.

The event was an absolute whirlwind of great conversations and inspirational stories, which reinforced the all-in focus our agency has on digital experience strategy and execution. Brands are lining up to take a step back, look at the overall customer journey and plot a digital strategy that will help differentiate them online and off.

Manning offered one salient take-away as part of his keynote that had folks scribbling in their notepads.

Write this down, he said: “I need my customers more than they need me.”

A good reminder for any of us focused on building organizations that deliver real value to customers.

About the Author

Jeff Cram co-founded Connective DX and serves as its Chief Strategy Officer, responsible for helping to shape the agency’s strategic direction, partnerships and service delivery. Jeff is an active member of the digital community as a blogger for Fast Company and a frequent speaker at national events on topics including experience design, analytics, and content management. Jeff lives in Boston with his wife and two sons and uses his trips to the Connective DX west coast office as an excuse to visit his fainting goats who currently reside on a farm near Portland.

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Delight is hosted by the team at Connective DX, where we design and build great digital experiences. We enable our clients to see their business from the outside in, and we build that insight into the systems we develop and stories we tell. We serve clients globally from our offices in Portland, OR and Boston, MA. We’re digital specialists, working at the intersection of strategy, design, technology, and digital enablement. Founded in 1997 we've been lucky to partner with great organizations such as Columbia Sportswear, OHSU, Harvard University and many more.